Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two

by Loren Rhoads

  “Morning,” Ariel wished.

  Eilif jumped, even though she must have heard Ariel come into the room. Poor thing. The widow’s life had been a hell that Ariel struggled not to imagine.

  “Good morning,” Eilif answered cheerfully. She got up from her screen to fix Ariel a cup of coffee, something she did every morning without being asked. Even though Ariel told her often how unnecessary the gesture was, Eilif did it anyway. It seemed to make her happy. She’d had so little happiness in her life that Ariel indulged her in this.

  “How are things today?” Ariel asked.

  “I found a home for the twins,” Eilif said. “Can I give them the news at lunchtime?”

  “Tell me about it first,” Ariel said, but she was sure the placement would be secure for the boys. Eilif treated each child as if he or she was one of her own. She wouldn’t send the kids anywhere that might endanger them. Once Ariel had showed her how to search, Eilif was more determined and vigilant than Ariel had ever been when looking into the backgrounds of potential parents.

  Ariel wondered if any of Eilif’s own sons had survived Raena’s attack on their father. She knew she would never, ever ask.

  Since they’d made the Veracity their home, the crew had set about customizing it. It had started life as a troop transport carried aboard the Arbiter, an Imperial warship that had masqueraded as a diplomatic courier. After Jonan Thallian and his family followed the Emperor’s command and spread the Templar plague, Thallian had taken the Arbiter and its crew into hiding with his family. All through the dissolution of the Empire and the hunt for the plague’s disseminator, the warship and its complement of transports rested beneath the ocean on Thallian’s homeworld. One of Thallian’s brothers commanded the Veracity in its middle age, when it served to carry private soldiers on the family’s errands—mostly supply runs, Raena understood, until they’d been ordered to come after her.

  The ship’s larger hold had served as a barracks for Thallian’s soldiers. Once the Veracity’s crew had settled into their stolen ship, they had dismantled the bunks, added walls, and converted the hold into several nice-sized cabins: one for Haoun—too tall to fit into a human-scale room—and another for Vezali, who preferred to sleep in a tank of water. The others they used as storerooms.

  Raena had taken over the smaller secondary hold for her gymnasium, which Vezali helped her to construct and stock. Mostly Raena did resistance training, working against the increased gravity in that room, practicing cartwheels and flips, climbing the walls or hanging from the ceiling, anything to strain her muscles and help her sleep.

  And sleep never came easily any more. Raena suspected that was because she’d slept away so much of her imprisonment. During the years of lying in total blackness, she hadn’t noticed much difference between sleeping and waking anyway. Perhaps her body felt it had stored up all the rest she would ever need. Or perhaps some part of her feared to drift away and release its grip on wakefulness, lest she find herself imprisoned again.

  Still, she needed rest to recharge. She knew her reflexes got dangerously hair-trigger if she didn’t sleep. Raena had spent enough time drugged against her will that she had a horror of doping herself. The odds of anything creeping up on her while she was vulnerable were slim now—she’d killed most of the creeps herself—but the years of vigilance made relaxing difficult.

  To Raena’s way of thinking, a spaceship was all too similar to a prison, whether the lights were on or not. Sometimes, if the Veracity wasn’t going anywhere, she’d suit up and go explore the outer hull, just to get out. Space might not have air or gravity, but it didn’t make her feel penned in, either.

  The only problem with that kind of escape—other than the inability to use it when the ship was traveling—was that she’d inherited her spacesuit from Jain Thallian. No matter what she did to sanitize it, the spacesuit continued to smell like teenaged boy inside.

  Today Raena retreated to her gymnasium, to hang from her hands and see just how many times she could raise her feet over her head. The exercise was tedious, but she hoped it would also prove exhausting.

  Someone rapped on the hold’s door, metal against metal. Raena looked up to see Mykah peering through the hatch. He grinned.

  “Come in,” she called.

  “Want some company?”

  “I’d be glad for it.” She let go of the chin-up bar and flexed her fingers.

  “Wanna spar?”

  “Sure.”

  He toed out of his deck shoes and stepped barefoot into the room. “Wow,” he grunted. “How high have you got the gravity dialed up today?”

  Raena turned a handspring. “Just trying to keep things interesting,” she explained. One of the things she liked about the old Earther ship was its location-specific gravity system. “You want me to set it back to Earth Normal?”

  “It’s kind of hard to breathe in here.”

  He let her walk past him, her back to him as she adjusted the gravity, before he attacked. She heard him coming, big bare feet slapping the deck, but she didn’t turn. He almost had her before she dodged right, using a grip on his forearm as a pivot point.

  He’d gotten too close to the wall to swing his left hand to grab her. Raena continued on around and released him, dancing back.

  “Heard me coming?” Mykah asked.

  “Like a loader.”

  “You’ll have to teach me how to move quieter.”

  She stuck out one booted foot. “The higher the heels, the stealthier the step.”

  “I doubt that.” He struck out with one leg, trying to catch her off balance. Raena kicked up higher and used the momentum to pull herself over into a walkover. She followed that with a handspring, twisting in midair so that she landed on both feet somewhere to his left, far from where he expected to find her when she came up.

  He spun to face her, found her in a crouch. “I’d be dead, wouldn’t I?”

  “Depends on what I was armed with,” Raena said.

  “Gun? Knife? Bad language?”

  Raena laughed. “I’ve never killed anyone with bad language yet. You’ll have to teach me the words first.”

  “Nah. It may be my only advantage.”

  She launched herself forward as Mykah charged again. This time she aimed for his waist. If she’d gone high and caught his head, even on accident, she could have snapped his neck when she changed trajectory.

  He managed to close one hand on the neckline of her catsuit. She heard it tear as she twisted her body. Still, she got behind him, used his moment of surprise and embarrassment and the corner of the wall and got her shoulder against his back. It was a matter of leverage. He’d leaned too far forward and couldn’t get his long legs under him to correct.

  She rode him to the ground, then rolled away before he could turn over and grab her.

  Mykah flopped over to look at her, breathing hard, winded by the fall. He’d remembered not to put his arms out to break the drop, which risked a broken bone, but he hadn’t curled up or relaxed into the fall as she’d tried to teach him.

  “Are you okay?” Raena asked. “If I broke you, Coni will kill me.”

  “Okay,” Mykah wheezed. “Good lesson.”

  Raena looked at him on the floor. She had plenty of time to move in, pin him, feel his body warm and lithe beneath hers. She wanted to do it. Wanted it bad enough that her mouth watered. So she didn’t. Instead, she folded her legs in the middle of the room and joined him on the floor, more than one of his arm’s lengths away.

  Mykah was Coni’s. Until the blue girl said he wasn’t, Raena wasn’t going to step in, no matter what her body might think it wanted. Shipboard life was complex enough for Raena without getting into the middle of someone else’s relationship, especially when she actually liked one of the members. She wanted to do him the favor of not complicating things. Besides, whether Coni liked Raena or not, Coni was a very good hacker, equally adept at teasing things out of the Veracity’s elderly computers or from the galactic news grid. Raena r
espected her. She wouldn’t want Coni for an enemy.

  It made Raena a little melancholy, though, to think that this might be her last sparring round with Mykah for a while. Maybe she could redirect him into kendo or something where they could wear armor and not actually touch—or even meet each other’s eyes.

  Mykah pushed himself into sitting up, his back against the wall. He was rubbing his ribs, which was a good sign. It meant that nothing was broken. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to stand touching them. “I almost got you this time,” he panted, nodding at her.

  Raena glanced down to assess the damage to her clothes. Good thing she’d slept in the exercise band. He’d ripped her neckline down past her shoulder, revealing the starburst scar from her assassination of Thallian. She lifted the flap of her torn neckline and wondered if the catsuit could be repaired. Maybe Vezali could sew, in addition to everything else she could do.

  “You may have killed my catsuit,” Raena conceded. “One of these days, you’re gonna catch me.”

  “Then you’ll be in trouble,” Mykah teased.

  No doubt, she thought. Raena glanced down at the deck and let the silence be awkward all on its own. She didn’t trust her voice to come out as anything other than flirty.

  He belongs to someone else, she reminded herself firmly, but loneliness was clearly not doing her any favors.

  Raena unwound herself from the floor. “Will you excuse me, Captain?” she asked, holding the torn catsuit in place. “I think we’ve done enough damage for today.”

  Coni sat back from the screen, flexing and retracting her claws. It still shocked her how extensive the surveillance system was aboard the Veracity. Despite the work Vezali had done putting up new cabin walls, there seemed to be no corner of the former diplomatic transport that couldn’t be spied upon. The ship’s previous owners had eyes everywhere.

  Coni had just unlocked the cameras in Raena’s makeshift gym. It was fascinating to watch her boyfriend working out with the little assassin. Mykah was practically half again the little woman’s height. His skin was a deep brown, still warmed in color from working on Kai, while Raena’s skin hadn’t lost its dusty grayish tone from her imprisonment. Coni would have called Raena stone-colored. That was one of the subtle things that had attracted her to humans in the first place: the variety and changeability of their hues.

  Coni had grown up feeling sorry for the fragile underdogs of the galaxy. She studied humans at school, with a life plan to become a social worker and make certain that humans had safe places to live, safer jobs to work, and healthcare that took their delicacy physiology into consideration. Her job on Kai had been meant to be a stepping-stone. There hadn’t been many humans on Kai—most couldn’t afford the pleasure planet, so it didn’t require much in the way of human staff to serve them—but the job led her to Mykah. He changed her life.

  After Mykah’s mother’s died during the War, his father had shipped out on any freighter that would have him. In consequence, Mykah had grown up in a group home. He hadn’t spent a lot of time around his own kind.

  Coni wasn’t jealous of Raena, because she saw Mykah’s curiosity as just that. But she didn’t trust the human woman not to take advantage of it, all the same.

  Coni told herself that she wasn’t really spying. She trusted Mykah. She only wanted to make certain he wouldn’t get hurt. She wanted to be able to step in before Raena did anything they would all regret.

  The Thallians probably had a master password to control all the cameras, but Coni was having to unlock them one at a time. Some, like the one in her cabin, she disconnected at the source. She left Haoun and Vezali their privacy as well. But Raena’s cabin had the most extensive set-up. Jonan Thallian apparently had not trusted his older brother and had monitored him whenever Revan was sent off on a mission. That made Coni’s fur ruffle uncomfortably, but she didn’t disconnect the cameras to Raena’s cabin. Just in case.

  CHAPTER 2

  Tarik Kavanaugh swallowed his smirk. The kid wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was. That description might have applied to Kavanaugh himself for so much of his life that he was amused to be on the other side of it. Now Kavanaugh was older, experienced, and he’d seen what came of trusting your friends to watch your back.

  He set his cards down carefully on the tabletop and listened to the happy chime as the computer declared him the winner. Still blank-faced, he leaned forward to collect the heap of credit chits from the center of the table.

  “Dammit, Zhon!” The kid directly across the table flung his own worthless cards down. “I thought you had it figured.”

  Kavanaugh swept the pile of chits into his pouch, cinched it tightly, and tucked it inside his jacket. These kids just couldn’t count as fast as he could, especially after all the xyshin they’d sucked down. Tolerance—and grown-up liquor—would come in time.

  If they didn’t get themselves killed first. Zhon reached for his gun, some kind of shiny model that Daddy probably bought him when he went away to some expensive business academy.

  Kavanaugh smoothly drew his own pistol—a Stinger, hot off the factory floor, courtesy of Ariel Shaad—and leveled it at the featherboy’s shoulder. Kavanaugh’s hand didn’t waver. The kid froze.

  “Drop it back in your holster,” Kavanaugh advised. “You don’t want to get into it with me, kid.”

  Defeated before he began, the bird boy let his gun drop home again.

  Kavanaugh eased the bottle of xyshin from the tabletop with his free hand. Really, the liquor was so sweet it made his teeth hurt. It was a lot like something college kids would drink, but the boys certainly didn’t need any more of it, if they were going to make it back to school alive. Kavanaugh thought he probably still had some of Ariel’s bourbon to cut it with. This bottle would make the good stuff she’d left him stretch a little further.

  He nodded to the boys and left the bar. Once outside, he melted into the crowd and ambled back to the Sundog. He kept one eye on the shopping displays as he passed. He had no interest in this year’s frocks, but it never hurt to keep an eye peeled in case someone with a few more years under his belt tried to follow Kavanaugh to his ship and help himself to some of Kavanaugh’s winnings—or less likely, if the college boys managed to grow a pair between the set of them and decided to try to get their money back.

  Time to be moving on, Kavanaugh thought. Winning a card game here and there kept food on the table, but it didn’t net enough to keep his ship in the air. He’d need to find some paying work soon.

  Raena was headed back to her cabin for a nap when she heard Mykah’s voice coming loudly from the cockpit. “No, we had no contact with any of them before we reached the solar system,” he lied.

  There was a pause, during which Raena couldn’t hear the question. She stopped to listen to Mykah’s answer: “That’s right. The crew of the Arbiter was on the planet’s surface when we found them. They had very little in the way of supplies, not even shelter from the elements, so we dropped everything we could spare for them and amplified their distress call. As you remember, the planet’s surface was destroyed after Jonan Thallian was found guilty of the spreading the Templar plague.”

  Raena stayed carefully out of range of the cockpit recorders, eavesdropping as Mykah did yet another interview about finding the Thallian hideout. He’d told the story so many times now that it sounded completely honest. And he was a good enough actor that it sounded unrehearsed.

  Too bad that it wasn’t what really happened. She’d taken one of Thallian’s clones hostage on Kai, stolen the shuttle he’d hunted her in, and turned them both into weapons against her former commander. The adventure hadn’t worked out entirely the way she’d intended, but Mykah and his crew had, in fact, been responsible for the rescue of the Arbiter’s survivors, whom they’d really found unprotected in the nuclear winter on the planet’s surface. In that sense, the crew of the Veracity were honestly heroes.

  Not that it mattered. Raena had no desire to set the record straight. It was
enough that the galaxy knew there had been a saboteur amongst the Thallians, someone who cracked their sea domes and let the ocean swallow them. Some of the interviewers suspected the saboteur had been part of the Veracity’s crew—why else had the ship been in a position in the backwater corner of the galaxy to hear the distress call when it came? Even though Raena hadn’t been the one to drown the city, she planned to protect Eilif as long as they both lived.

  Anyway, Mykah had made himself an expert on the Thallians, capable of reeling off every possible statistic, every death for which Jonan Thallian bore responsibility, every step of his journey to disseminate the Templar plague. Mykah sounded just like the truth-and-justice-obsessed kid that he was. His enthusiasm and outrage made it easy to believe that he had just happened to be headed to explore the Thallians’ supposedly abandoned homeworld when the destruction took place.

  Mykah seemed to adore the attention. Raena counted herself lucky to have met the one man on Kai who would love every minute of pranking the media.

  It didn’t hurt that he always arranged to have Coni, Haoun, or Vezali in the cockpit with him when he recorded an interview, so that the nonhuman majority of the galaxy could be vicariously represented by the nonhuman majority of the crew. The three other crewmembers drew lots so that everyone got their turn on camera.

  Unlike the rest of the crew, however, Raena had no desire for fame. She was content that the universe should continue to take no notice of her. Having her likeness immortalized on a twenty-year-old Imperial wanted poster had been notoriety enough.

  She hadn’t reckoned with the fascination the Thallians and their evil would continue to hold over the galaxy. After she’d killed the man and his clones, she’d allowed Mykah to break the news to the rest of the galaxy, thinking that would expedite the rescue of the Arbiter’s hundreds of survivors. They could tell the tale of the madman’s exile under the sea, the ancient mystery could be solved, and everyone would be ready to let the past be past and move on into the future. Instead, different news organizations kept picking over the story like they were sifting the bones.